A final farewell

March 25, 2005

Goodbye 39th Brigade.

That’s harder to say than I thought it’d be.

My dad came to Fort Sill last night to drive me home today. It’s a day I’ve been looking forward to for months.

But now that it’s here, I find it hard to leave.

It’s hard to leave these soldiers I’ve come to know so well and who have come to know me better than most. It’s a bizarre feeling to know that Iraq is so far away, both physically and mentally.

It’s actually unnerving to think that today, the life I’ve lived for the past 12 months comes to an abrupt halt.

To me, today is a collision of worlds.

And my comfort zone is all out of whack.

I think about all the laughter I’ve shared with the soldiers of the 39th, I think about what we endured together.

And I think about how no one in my other world will ever fully understand. These are things I’ve heard soldiers talk about almost constantly over the last week.

But, you see, it was my job to create a link between the two worlds of Iraq and home. Through my words, I was supposed to help one world understand the other.

And now I realize that no one can really understand war without being in the midst of it. There’s no way to describe some things.

The sound of a rocket-propelled grenade and the zing of a bullet zipping past way too close should be paralyzing, but they’re not. Why? I don’t know.

Can’t explain it.

The sound of explosions in war movies is so much more quiet than in reality that it’s almost distracting.

We know these things. We know the smell of sewage in the streets. We have philosophies on what to do when mortars and rockets are coming in. Some run to bunkers, others stay where they’re at.

And we’ll talk about the moments we learned these things with each other and laugh at those moments of fear and survival.

It was an amazing time.

And I spent it with an amazing group of people who will never be far from my mind. The soldiers of the 39th Brigade protected me so I could do my job.

They kept me safe so I could carry a pen without wishing I had a gun.

And they did it no matter what I wrote, good or bad.

The laughter will continue, no doubt. It just won’t happen as often.

It will erupt at those random moments when 39ers run into each other at a gas station or grocery store.

And moments of silence will creep up on everyone as they remember those who died beside them in Iraq. I’m sure those moments will happen as randomly as others.

They will happen, don’t doubt it.

Posted by Amy at March 25, 2005 03:11 PM